[joegaudet]

Having jumped back into some green field work in Scala in the past few days, I will say I'm quite impressed with the improvements to the SBT, IntelliJ, universe. Compile time seems to be improved considerably (though the project is still quite small so time will certainly tell).

One problem, which is also one of the advantages of scala is that the interop with Java often means that all your Option[] etc code can still get NPEed by some offending Java Lib you've decided to use.

As the fidelity and ubiquity of pure scala libs improves this will hopefully go away to a some extend.

[fedesilva]

You can always use Option() as in:

scala> Option(System.getProperty("kaboom"))

res1: Option[String] = None

then map, getOrElse or fold at will.

(edited format)

[joegaudet]

For sure you can, but the internals of the libraries can also cause NPEs because of turtles all the way down :P

We've been running scala in production for 4 years, and had our share of NPEs in our code and in the libraries we host. My point I guess was just that it's not entirely true that they will not boil to the surface on occasion.

[fedesilva]

It's true what you say about libraries and turtles. Still it's rare the event when I get an NPE from my/our code.

Sometimes think I would love to have a layer between us and Java. Some sort of FFI which returned everything on an Option.

Probably too cumbersome, but still ...

[saosebastiao]

Thanks for mentioning this. I had no idea. All this time I had been doing null checks...this makes it so much less painful!